Equifax Small Business

Small Business

Effective Date: October 18, 2013
This privacy policy applies only when you purchase, access, or use U.S. Equifax Small Business Products for personal or business purposes through the Equifax.com web site.

Special note for parents:The Equifax web site is a general audience site and not designed or intended to attract children younger than 13. We do not collect personal information from any person we actually know is younger than 13.

If you have questions or comments about Equifax's privacy policy, please e-mail us at privacy@Equifax.com or write to Chief Privacy Officer, Equifax Inc., 1550 Peachtree Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30309.

Information Collection and Use

We collect personal and non-personal information on our web site to fulfill your requests and contact you.

We collect personal and non-personal information to customize the content you see, fulfill your requests for products, improve our products, and contact you. We also use your information to pre-fill some fields to save you from entering the same information over and over again. By knowing about you, we can deliver more helpful information, products and tools, and offer you the most relevant services.

There are aspects of our site that can be enjoyed as a visitor, but you need to register in order to take advantage of some features on the site. In addition, Small Business products are available for purchase through our site.

Information We Collect From You

Registration: We receive information from you when you register for the Small Business Member Center or sign up for our special offers. Becoming a Member enables you to purchase small business credit reports or to purchase a monitoring service for small business credit reports.

Purchasing a Small Business Credit Report or small business credit monitoring product: We collect information about you when you purchase Small Business Products. The information includes your name, address and credit card information if you are purchasing the products for your personal use, or information about your company and credit card information if you are purchasing products for your business. We collect your Social Security Number in order to ensure that you establish a unique account within the Small Business Member Center and to allow you to securely reset your password when necessary.

Contacting Equifax Small Business: We receive information from you online when you send us e-mail, or complete applications or other forms.

Polls and surveys: When you respond to a poll or a survey sponsored by us and/or one of our partners, we may ask you to provide additional information or answer certain questions in order to participate. We may also use the contact information you provide to us to ask whether you would like to participate in future surveys. If we ask for identifying information as part of a survey, we will delete the identifying information after one year and store your answers for up to 7 years.

Log information: When you visit our site, our servers automatically collect log information. This information may include your web page request, Internet Protocol (IP) address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request, and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. We collect log information so that we can properly administer our system and gather aggregate information about how our site is being used, including the pages visitors are viewing on our site.

Cookies: We use session and persistent cookie technology in order to personalize and improve your experience on the site. Our Web site optimization and marketing partner, Adobe Omniture, may also place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser, sometimes called a "third-party cookie."

Web beacons: We and our site optimization and marketing partner also use web beacons, sometimes called single-pixel GIFs, that momentarily direct your browser to a server other than Equifax in a way that may not be apparent to you. Web beacons are used to count users who visited specific pages and determine which emails were opened and/or acted upon when we send HTML-formatted email messages. We may link your identifying information to web beacons.

Information We Collect From Others

We may also collect information about your transactions with us, our affiliates, or others, such as the products and services you ordered. We may collect personally identifiable information about you, such as name, address, and e-mail addresses, as well as information such as your company's industry and years in business to help us understand the profile of business customers that have purchased our products.

When we associate information that we obtain from third parties with personal information that we have collected under this policy, we will treat the acquired information like the information that we collected ourselves. We will not share information we obtain from third parties in personally identifiable form. However, we may share aggregated, non-personal information as described in this policy, including information we obtained from third parties, in a form that will not allow you to be identified.

How We Use The Information We Collect

We use the information we collect about you to handle the requests you make to us, to deliver to you the Small Business products and services you requested, to administer our web site, and to design new products, services and offers.

Additionally, as legally permitted, we may use the information we collect for your Small Business Membership and other requests, including postal address and/or e-mail address, to send you promotions for Small Business products and services. (Of course, you may opt out of receiving such promotions. See the "Choice and Control Over Your Information" section of this privacy policy.)

We use session and persistent cookies on our site. For example, cookies are used in order to:

Allow you to order more than once during a visit without having to re-enter your information each time you place an order for a Small Business product;

Allow us to gather aggregated statistical data about the use of our web site;

Help us improve your navigation of our web site;

Enable us to store your preferences for certain kinds of information and marketing offers;

Help us to provide features such as personalized greetings;

If you're a Member of Small Business, allow us to store your user name and encrypted customer identification number so that we recognize you when you return to our web site;

Help us combat identity theft and fraud with more reliable identity verification and authentication data.

Our partners use these cookies in order to help us better understand how visitors use our site, and how we can create and present marketing offers that would be of interest to you and our current and future customers.

As part of our marketing effort, we have agreements with companies, sometimes called "Ad Networks," that serve advertising on behalf of third parties. These Ad Networks may place or recognize a unique cookie, also called a "third party cookie," on your browser when you visit a web site that has a contract with a particular ad network. Ad Networks use cookies to understand Web usage patterns of people who see advertisements, to control the sequence of advertisements you see, to provide you with the most relevant advertising, and to make sure you don't see the same ad too many times. Ad Networks may connect information about pages you visited on our site with information about pages you visit on other sites and show you advertising based on this combined information, including advertising for our products. While we do not control Ad Networks or what they do with the information they collect, we have relationships only with organizations that have agreed to participate in the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) and abide by NAI principles, which prohibit members from connecting personally identifiable information to information they collect through cookies without your explicit consent.

To Whom We May Disclose the Information We Collect

We take reasonable precautions to be sure that nonaffiliated third parties and affiliates, to whom we disclose your personally identifiable information are aware of our privacy policy and will treat the information in a similarly responsible manner. Our contracts and written agreements with nonaffiliated third parties that receive information from us about you prevent further transfer of the information.

We will not disclose your personal information to third parties except to provide you with a product or service you request or under certain circumstances as described in this policy.

Disclosure for legal reasons: We may release personal information to third parties: (1) to comply with valid legal requirements such as a law, regulation, search warrant, subpoena or court order; or (2) in special cases, such as a physical threat to you or others, a threat to homeland security, a threat to our system or network, or cases in which we believe it is reasonably necessary to investigate or prevent harm, fraud, abuse, or illegal conduct.

Agents and contractors: Our contractors sometimes have access to your personal information in the course of assisting in operating our business and providing products or services to you. These contractors include vendors and suppliers that provide us with technology, services, and/or content for the operation and maintenance of our site. Some of these relationships may be with companies that co-brand portions of their site and services, or that provide services to you on our behalf. Co-branded sites may have their own privacy policies posted on their sites. If you visit a co-branded site, please read the privacy policy that is posted on that site. Access to your personal information by these contractors is limited to the information reasonably necessary for the contractor to perform its limited function. Contractors have an obligation under their contracts with us to keep your information confidential and to comply with our privacy and security policies.

Links to other sites: We may provide links to other sites that provide products and services that might be of interest to you, such as business loans. When you click on one of those links, we will not provide any personal information about you, but will let the site know that you came from Equifax. We do not control the privacy practices and policies of other sites. Please read their privacy policies in order to understand what information they collect about you and how they use it.

Aggregated, non-personal information: We may share aggregated non-personal information about you with third parties. This is information that is combined with the non-personal information of other users and does not allow you to be identified or contacted. Depending on the circumstances, we may or may not charge third parties for this aggregated information. We also may not limit the third parties' use of the aggregated information.

Changes in our corporate structure: If all or part of our company is sold, merged or otherwise transferred to another entity, the personal information you have provided to us may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will take steps to ensure that, without your consent, any personal information that is transferred will not be used or shared in a manner inconsistent with the Privacy Policy under which it was collected.

Your Choice and Control Over Your Information

You may decline to provide personal information to us and/or refuse cookies in your browser, although some features or services may not be available to you or may not function properly as a result.

Disabling Cookies: To turn off cookies placed by our web site optimization and marketing partners, you can opt out by visiting http://www.audiencescience.com/privacy, http://optout.netmng.com/optout.php and http://www.omniture.com/en/privacy/policy#optout . If you wish to opt out of participating in advertising programs conducted by Ad Networks, please go to the NAI Opt-Out site and follow the instructions on that site. After you opt out, you will still see advertising, but this advertising will not be tailored to your Web preferences and usage patterns.

Your browser software can be set to reject all cookies or to accept cookies only from our site. Most browsers offer instructions on how to set the browser to reject cookies in the "Help" section of the toolbar. If you reject our cookies, you may not be able to log in or use certain functions and conveniences of our site.

Avoiding Web Beacons: To avoid web beacons in some emails, log in to Member Center, select My Profile under My Account, and select "Text" for E-mail Format.

Opting Out of Our Providing Information About You To Third Parties: If you prefer that we not disclose to non-affiliated third parties any personally identifiable information that we collect about you in connection with your purchase or access to Small Business products, you may choose to opt out of such disclosures. You may exercise your right to opt out at any time by logging in to the Member Center, selecting My Profile under My Account, and checking the box next to "I choose to opt out."

Opting Out of Our Personal Small Business Promotional Offers: If you do not wish to receive promotional offers sent to you by e-mail, you may opt out of further promotional offers by clicking on the "unsubscribe" button in the e-mail. After you opt out, you will continue to receive e-mails related to the operation and administration of your account, such as a request for updated credit card information when the card to which you charge your purchase of Small Business product is about to expire.

Do Not Track signal: We treat the data of everyone who comes to our site in accordance with this privacy policy, whatever their Do Not Track setting. We give you choices about sharing your information with third parties and receiving promotional offers. You can exercise your choices as described in this section of our privacy policy.

Efforts We Make to Safeguard Your Personal Information

We are committed to protecting the security of your information through procedures and technology designed for this purpose by taking these steps:

We limit access to your personal information to employees having a reasonable need to access this information to provide products and services to you. Employees who misuse information are subject to disciplinary action, including termination.

We have reasonable physical, technical and procedural safeguards to help protect your personal information.

In areas that contain your personal information, we use secure socket layer (SSL) encryption to help protect this information while it is in transit between our servers and your computer.

What you can do to help keep your information secure

You also have a role in protecting the security of information about you.

Choose your passwords carefully: Always create a password that's easy for you to remember but difficult for someone else to figure out. Don't use your name, address, phone number, initials, Social Security number, license plate or birthday. Don't use names of your friends, family or pets, company names, common numerical sequences or the word "password."

Log out and close your browser: Open browsers invite snoops. When you finish your online session, close your browser to erase any information it may have temporarily stored on your computer.

Install antivirus software and spyware protection: Viruses are dangerous. They can slip into your system without your knowledge. Some viruses such as Trojan Horses can capture the contents of your system, including your passwords. Installing up-to-date antivirus software and running it will help thwart these and other unwanted programs.

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